More Tales of an RPG Player

More Tales of a RPG Player

I tell wacky, weird and otherwise bizarre stories about some of the Role-Playing Games that I have played in, and apparently you guys really enjoy them ( https://imgur.com/gallery/95KJZ ).

Would you like to know more?

...And yes, there is a game where you can play as a fat gopher with a flail. More than one, in fact - Mouseguard is gritty and violent, Ironclaw is weeb-lunacy with ferrets and After The Bomb is Mad Max, but with sentient psychic camels. Seriously. I named him Fergus.

Please enjoy.

This one isn't so much a weird story as it is just something that happened once, and that we no longer speak about.

RPG aficionados among you may have heard of a role-play game called FATAL, so you get to skip to Act 3 of this story by me saying; "I almost played a game that is worse than FATAL". You sit and imagine that for a few minutes while I explain this to the normies in the audience.

So, you guys: There is a RPG in this world called FATAL, and it is the worst dumpster fire of a game system ever printed. As well as being horrible sexist and racist (female characters have lower intelligence than male ones, though not as low as black characters), and incredibly crude and stupid (go ahead and randomly roll the radius and 'cup size' of your gonads in inches, there's at least two whole appendices for that), it's also just badly written. Littered with typos, page redirects that don't go to where the relevant information is, it's just hot garbage. 900 PAGES of hot garbage.

I almost played in a game called deadEarth, which - while not as vulgar - is actually just plain 'worse'. Here's how you make a character in deadEarth, according to the book:

+ Roll on a table to see how old you are.
+ Roll on a table to see how tall/fat/strong/fast you are. BONUS ROUND: the book DOES NOT CONTAIN the page that tells you how strong and fast you are, it's literally missing from the print run.
+ Roll two six-sided dice 100 times on your skill table, and make a note of when you roll double-1's and double-6's.
+ Spend 1200 skill points on those 100 skills at a factoral rate (rank 1 costs 1, rank 2 costs 1+2, rank 3 costs 1+2+3, etc)
+ Roll a random amount of money between $6 and $5,000 and spend it.
+ Roll a random amount of "Perks" (these are just quirky little things that change your character in an arbitrary way)
+ Throw your character sheet in the bin because you're dead.
+ Do this THREE TIMES and "pick the character which survives".

That last sentence is a word-for-word quote from the rulebook by the way, just in case you thought that I was rolling an outlier and was bitching because I couldn't Git Gud.

The first character I ever generated with this nightmare of a system? I got *117* dice rolls in and my character - a eunuch who could start fires with his mind and with the magical homing instinct of the average pigeon - spontaneously exploded due to a randomly generated "Perk" which instantly inflicted more damage to my head, than I had in my entire body, arms, legs and crotch (you cause double damage if you hit someone there, FYI) combined.

Thus ended our one and only session of deadEarth.

For the purposes of this story, I would be overjoyed to first introduce you to one of my Game-Masters who goes by the tag 'Gabriel'.

Gabriel is a wonderful guy and I cherish him and his friendship dearly, but holy christ can he be hard work when we sit down to play a game. As was as being dailysex as fuck, his entire philosophy when playing is that you should be bale to do anything in a game. ANYTHING. Whatever you can bring to mind, he should be able to look in the book and find an appropriate dice to roll for it. And if he can't? Then he'll just write his OWN goddamn game where you can! With blackjack! And hookers!

...No, really. One time we spent two hours roleplaying as people who were playing blackjack, with hookers. But I digress.

The game that he devised was a medieval fantasy that went by the name of AQ (yes, I know that, and YOU know that, but it made him happy so we didn't argue) that had a few very simple core rules, which essentially meant that you could do anything if you rolled 4 or higher on a d6.

The problems began when Gabriel decided that he liked his game so much, he wanted to run it AND play in it, which his own character. This phenomenon is called a DMPC (short for Dungeon Master's Player Character), and is incredibly difficult to do correctly, for it's very, very easy to go overboard with your precious little avatar and end up completely overshadowing all of the other players, who are but puppet in your own private little play.
Did I mention that Gabriel has the self-restraint appropriate for the average 8 year old? No? Well, now you know.

To cut out a big swathe of games played and monsters slain, Gabriel's character was a "Phoenix Knight" - that is, a heavily armoured, super tough Paladin-like warrior who could turn on a special ability at will to start a 10ft conflagration with them at the centre. To fight a Phoenix Knight, you have to either be immune to Magic AND Fire, or be willing to tank a shit-load of damage even before she cut you to ribbons with her Holy Greatsword of Day-Ruining. And she was the Captain of the local Royal Guard, so she ran around the place with her own retainer; another Phoenix Knight, similarly equipped but of slightly lower level, doing her bidding loyally and without failure.

One day, this Phoenix Knight and the rest of the party were stuck at a impasse; SHE wanted to join up with a local army, fight against evil and save the realm from darkness, whereas WE wanted to get paid and laugh at the assholes who were getting slit up by some other fun-looking dudes. I especially wasn't having any of it - I had things to do and places to go, and I wasn't interested in helping her get a promotion off'f my blood, sweat and hard work.
The argument got pretty heated, in the metaphorical sense and very nearly in the literal sense. Nose-to-nose and screaming in each others' faces, I refused to do what I was told to the point where the Phoenix Knight laid down an ultimatum; do what I tell you, or I'm going Super Saiyan and burning the shit out of you right here, right now.
How can you say 'no' to such a direct and potentially lethal threat as that,, coming from such an overpowered and influential enemy as her?

By being a fucking Lizardman-Ogre, is how. My character - his name is Itzl, by the way - was 12 feet of rippling, crocodilian brutality. My leathery skin was as thick and iron-hard as some guys' platemail armour, my claws with the approximate size and shape of pickaxes, and I could fit her entire torso into my mouth without chewing, if I felt like it. (I may or may not have gotten over the whole "punching a Crocodile God" at that point, but you'll never know for sure).

So by way of response, I hit her without warning.
In the face.
Hard.
With the first thing that came to hand.
Which was her squire.
Who was currently riding his horse.

Ma-HOO-ssive damage and much hilarity ensued; it didn't kill her outright, but she damn well wished it did and it put her down long enough for Itzl to draw his spear and rip some impressively big parts off'f her until she stopped moving. It hurt like hell, but.... worth it.
The rest of the party seemed to be okay with this turn of events, though with unexpected compassion they kicked some dirt into the crater before we left to go and fuck up some elves who owed us. Because fuck elves.

Gabriel, fortunately, saw the funny side and we continued to play the same game for several more months, until a COMPLETELY UNRELATED INCIDENT when Itzl was stepped on by a giant made of granite that ate souls through it's fingertips. It was just that sort of game.

I like to think that I'm the sort of person who will put my money where my mouth is; for all his faults, Gabriel puts up with enough of my shit that it's only fair for me to run a game of my own and let him get some revenge. We'll get to some of my players' specific hijinks shortly, but this is a PSA from me to any other budding game masters out there regarding how to have a good time in your game:

If your players ask to do something, NEVER tell them "No".

DISCLAIMERDISCLAIMERDISCLAIMER!!! This is NOT the same thing as "Always Say Yes", because that will get you in fucking trouble and you'll wish death upon me if you try it. And I don't want death, I want you guys to have a good time.

Also known as; "Look, do you want to play the game or not?"

Here's a practical example; your players in the middle of a fight, and one of them asks you, "Is there a big table in the room? Big enough that I can stand upon?"
Tell him "yes". Maybe it was hiding being a fat guy who just moved out of the way, or it fell out of some passing kangaroo's pouch, or something. Hell; magically teleport a 4ft by 8ft solid mahogany sun'bich in there is you have to, because it represents two important facts: 1) tables are not that important in the grand scheme of things, and 2) your PLAYER is telling you that he WANTS a table to be there, so that he can do something COOL with it! Let your players do cool, if unimportant things!

Negotiate, if you need to. "You don't see an enormous pile of gold and rubies piled into the corner, but you DO see a battered looking lamp with the words 'rub me' etched onto the side of it" is always better than "No, there's no pile, shut up idiot". Cue tangentially related plot device! There may be piles of gold and rubies at the end of it! Honest! Or possibly Cthulhu, if you continue tapping your pencil against that empty glass ANDY....

Never Saying No has, in the past, gotten me these wonderful little anecdotes simply because it's fun to let your players, play.

+ Big fight in a restaurant. "Is there a lobster-tank in here? Like, pick your own to eat fresh, kinda thing?" Why yes there is, right behind you. This tiny allowance resulted in lobster-nunchucks. LOBSTER-NUNCHUCKS, PEOPLE.
+ Players are sucked through a magical vortex and into a gladiatorial arena filled with demons. "Were any cars or trucks sucked through with us?" Why, yes there were - would like like a Cadillac or something with better mileage? That player spent the next 30 minutes driving around and going full Grand Theft Auto on hellbeasts, cackling maniacally and making car-related puns with ever sickening impact.
+ An undead player replacing bits of his missing anatomy with bits stolen from other undead monsters after collosal damage rendered him stable, though incapacitated. He wasn't a necromancer and had no way of properly controlling said-bits, but he was a dab hand with a hammer and nails and was fine, so long as you kept his sword arm out of reach of the other player characters.
+ A player using another player as a bludgeon. (Don't worry; he was already dead. Well, bleeding out anyway.)
+ Improvised weapons of all sorts, including; egg noodle used as an impromptu lasso; scrapyard crane used as a bludgeon; car used as a battering ram (as in, it was picked up by a player and forcibly shoved through a doorway); rabies.
+ Flashbang grenades EVERY-FUCKING-WHERE (Not as bad as it sounds, so long as you remember the secret cardinal rule of GMing; you can do whatever you like to the players, if they have already done it to you first!)

  So, y'know, have some fun. Don't always say "yes", but never say "no".

The problem with telling players that they are free to try whatever they want, is that at some point they will try to do something, and on that day you will learn something about your friends that you can never unlearn despite all of your best attempts.

Case in point: Gabriel.... Jesus H. Fucking Christ on a pogo-stick, I love you man, but you got problems.

After the success (?) of my werewolf'd character, we came back to Warhammer Fantasy Roleplay a few months later and started a campaign with the newer edition of the game. I forget what I was playing at the time - some kind of human crossbowman, I think, completely unremarkable except that he could afford only 1/10th the amount of ammo as the average archer, because I'm s-m-r-t like that - but the important thing is that Gabriel wasn't running the game. Instead, he had been given the chance to play for once, and he came up with a Dwarf Miner because "Dwarfs are cool, and what else would a dwarf do for a living?"

Our first mission in the first session was to escort a baggage train of wagons through the Darkwuld - an ancient forest infested with Evil Dead-style horrors and with hideously deformed, cannibalistic Beastmen lurking behind every tree. And wouldn't you know it, a bunch of said Beastmen jumped out from behind the trees and started stabbing bits of pointy metal into the softer parts of our baggage train - the horses, the drivers, the players, and so on.

It goes very badly for us - the dice betray all of us at least once and at some point Gabriel's Dwarf and my Crossbowman end up valiantly defending the underside of a cart, engaging in a debate along the theme of "what the fuck are we going to do!?"

Jikozi - another tag for another player - is off on his own somewhere, is being beaten down without remorse and neither of us can easily get to aid him, and Poon (look, I don't pick the nicknames, okay? They were already there when I met them. And no, I won't tell you what they call me) was a character not entirely suited to direct combat, so he was having his own problems elsewhere.

Anyway. What we needed was.... a distraction.

Gabriel: "Hey, Mads? Is it just The_Infernal_Contraption and I under this wagon or are there anyone else?
Mads (The GM): "There's other pilgrims with you. Mostly women and children, as the menfolk are out FIGHTING THE EVIL MONSTERS."
Gabriel, oblivious to subtle hints: "Children? How many are there?"
Mads: "I dunno.... About a dozen?"
Gabriel: "Cool, I have a plan to get us out of here. I light my torch and I jab it at the nearest kid!"
Everyone at the table: "What the fuck?"
Gabriel: "I jab the torch at the nearest kid. Either he runs out into the forest, screaming because he's scared of me...."
Everyone at the table: "What the actual gibbering fuck?"
Gabriel: ".... or I light him on fire and he does it anyway. That'll distract the beastmen, won't it?"

It didn't work, in case you were wondering.
Oh no, wait, allow me to amend that sentence - the beastmen were not distracted by the crowd of screaming, flammable children running about the place. If anything, it only made their extermination of the pilgrims and the players all the more righteous, in many ways. I at least had the good fortune to see the stain that was Gabriel's Dwarf wiped from the face of the planet by a two-handed battle axe before I too perished at the fangs of a goat-headed cannibal, so at least I got that going for me.

This wasn't a one-off, and it wasn't always Gabriel.
Remember the fight in the scrapyard that I mentioned above? The one with the crane being used to swing around and bludgeon people from above? The same fight also featured an open-air pit full of car-battery acid "like in that scene in the Superman movie" - take a guess as to how many belligerent but otherwise fairly innocuous thugs got tossed into that thing, still alive and screaming?
And that game of Mouseguard, where the innocent, sweet-natured and bookish young adventurer (who, by the way, happened to be a fluffly little dormouse with cuddliest little face and sweety-weety-widdle whiskers) became a grizzled, one-eyed, PTSD-suffering 'Nam vet after one day of playtime due to an unfortunate run-in with a raven? A raven that was first encountered *eating his sister*?
Ask a player to go shopping for a new gun? "I dunno, I roll haggle, I guess". Ask them to write a decription of their character? "Kinda like me, but more bad-ass and with a trenchcoat". Tell them that they need to extract information from a prisoner? Holy shit, you would not believe what ordinary men who work in an office and have wives and children can dream up with 2 minutes of advance notice. A simple interrogation got downright medieval in a hurry.

And that's not even the scary stuff. I'm not going to tell you about the time that Jikozi's character started collecting "trophies" from people that he had stalked and killed in a particularly grim game of Dark Heresy. Or - entirely unbidden for me and at his own choice of character quirks - that his character would occasionally stand in the corner of the room, smiling faintly and sniffing them....

Seriously, guys; roleplay with your friends, but be prepared to move house and change your 'phone number afterwards if you know what's good for ya.

As you might imagine, after having two or three of my characters exterminated in unlikely yet surprisingly repetitive circumstances, I thought that I would try my hand at running a game and addressing the rebalance of that situation.

You should always respect your GM because, of all the people at the table, they're the one who has put the most work into the game and they won't appreciate it if their players start to come across as ungrateful. To paraphrase the example from Noah "The Spoony One" Antwiler; it's like in baseball. If the batter hits a home-run but he just stands on the plate, watching the ball go for 20 seconds before lazily walking around the diamond with a shit-eating grin? That's 20 seconds of middle-finger to the pitcher, who is subsequently going to do his absolute damnedest to see that that player gets a fastball to the ribs the next time he steps up to bat.

Not that GM's are vindictive you understand - we're certainly not cruel and we're ABSOLUTELY not spiteful - but there's this thing called The Code, and it goes like this: fuck, and be fucked with.

My game of Dark Heresy degenerated into such a procession. The party of players - a group of acolytes working for one Inquisitor - found themselves throwing down against the acolytes of another, rival Inquisitor.... and they were less than respectful of my carefully crafted battleground.
What should have been a tense duel between nemesis - I had carefully crafted each member of the opposing warband to be a surmountable, though challenging and engaging mirror match to each of the players, forcing them to either fight for their very lives at the very top of their game, or to switch up and pit themselves against facsimiles of their own friends. How would you react, for example, if you had just watched your best friend brutally murder your evil twin, and then look over at you with a thoughtful expression?

But no. No tense and meaningful "Those Who Fight Monsters...." battle for me. Why bother, when you can just pitch grenades and molotovs in through the window, then kick through the doors and full-auto everything still moving in a few rounds? And then piss on the ashes and complain that there wasn't any good loot to be found throughout the still-smouldering ruins? The fuckers.....

Still, there would be time to get my reven-... to rebalance the next fight "to prove more of a challenge".

Not spiteful. Just fucky.

With the opposing warband dead, the players chose to go after bigger game; their boss, who was hiding in his lair within a docked spaceship. All corridors and bulkhead doors, sort of thing.
The players landed in the docking bay of the ship and immediately came under fire - there's hired muscle and automated turrets and such, but the enemy Inquisitor is there too. He bolted for safety, and 2 of the 5 players ran after him, looking to chase him down and end the fight while their friends held the line ready to extract on short notice.
They chased the Inquisitor down a blind corridor and found, to their astonishment, a short T-junction where two closed doors sealed a dead end. They didn't know which way the Inquisitor had run, so they had to pick one and hope for the best.

I'm not saying that they COULDN'T have correctly guessed which door the guy had run through and got the drop on him, they totally could have done just that.... If they hadn't fucked with my fight earlier in the game.

They went left, and wouldn't you know it but all they found was the broom closet. Behind them, the other door opened up and out stepped the Inquisitor with a tricked-out machine gun swinging in his hands like the wrath of God Himself; right behind them, point blank range, dead to rights with a full round to pout death into these two unfortunate saps, and death it would be - in Dark Heresy, you can choose to fire machine guns at "full auto", which empties your clips immediately buy lets you fire every single one of the 30 bullets in it in one go, rather than 1 (single shot) or 5 (semi-auto) as normal.
It was going to be so sweet....!

Roll the dice. Miss.
Roll the dice. Miss.
Roll the dice. Miss.
Roll the dice. Miss.
Roll the dice. Miss.
Roll the dice. Hit! Minimum damage, soaked by armour.

30 bullets first in 3 seconds from a distance of ~8 feet.... and the two guys looked back at my "Big Bad-Ass End Boss" like he'd just unzipped and pissed on their shoes.

The next week after that game, we played cards.

I have a confession to make; I am an even bigger nerd than you ever imagined, because I am a LARPer.

LARP - an acronym for Live-Action Role Play - is basically what happens when a bunch of D&D nerds got together one Halloween dressed as their characters, had a blast, and now there's a multi-million dollar industry built up around drunken weekends smacking each other in the head with rubber swords. Ever see that movie, "Role Models"? You may not believe me, but it's disturbingly close to the truth.

Laugh if you like, but tell me this; when is the last time you and 2,000 like-minded people got together in the fresh air, bonded, screwed around, and had that special kind of fun that leaves normal people dazed and bewildered every time that you start talking?
And "watching baseball" isn't fun, so don't give me that shit.

In summary, in the last 10 years I have...

+ Spent 72 consecutive hours dressed as a pirate and making 'booty' jokes without pause, even for sleep.
+ Dressed as a zombie and been powerslammed off a children's climbing frame in a public park a 4 in the afternoon, while stone-cold sober.
+ Joined a gaggle of a dozen people dressed like the Knights of Ni and gone on a mid-afternoon beer run to the nearest supermarket.
+ Performed multiple "Rituals" wherein I have cursed another person with the heinous gift of Daemonic Possession (by Ritual, I mean "20 minutes of improvisational theatre with props and a live audience as I re-enacted the bedroom scene from The Exorcist while dressed in bones and feathers, like a witch-doctor)
+ Had a sword fight while crawling through the ventilation system of a condemned building. (No, really; there's a place in Manchester, England where some guy built a 3D tunnel system in an old warehouse and rents it out to LARPers and Airsofters)
+ Teleported a crack-squad of Roman Legionnaires into Mordor-But-Not-Named-That-For-Copyright-Reasons and extracted a kidnapped nobleman, like a squad of ultimate badasses.
+ Chased some people through a forest with "knives" in the pitch black at 2 in the morning, and they thanked me for it. Normally they're all "Aaargh!" and "please let me go" and "oh god he took my eyes" so as you can imagine this was a pleasant change of pace.
+ Shot in the nuts once a month, for ten years. I'm not sure that's necessarily a perk, but it usually gets some laughs when I tell people about it, for some reason.

....Among quite a lot of stuff that I don't even remember. In short: being an uber-nerd can be pretty cool, if you're willing to give it a try and meet some very strange-but-lovely people. But y'know.... don't say no, right?

BONUS ROUND! The image for this story was taken by a very nice person named Kren_Cooper, who attends various 'fests in England and very generously takes pictures of people who are too busy or too elaborately dressed to grab a camera themselves.
I know this, because I was there when he took this one - have a guess and see if you can spot which one of the multicoloured weirdos is me? ;)

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Have fun guys, and remember; elves suck, and never in a good way.

And of course: Dog Tax. This is Crystal, a 65 kilo (~150lb in Ye Olde Units) Newfoundland who absolutely is a lapdog. I mean, it's not as though you have any say in the matter; if she wants to sit down, take a breath and brace yourself.

She's not much of a roleplayer - the lack of thumbs make handling dice a bit..... *ruff*.